The "justification" for this article on physics being in The Economist is apparently spelled out in the first paragraph of TFA:
In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum...
So I suppose there could be an article in Physics Review about an Economics discovery made by a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, but I won't hold my breath.
It would be untraceable back to me. Even if my ISP is Earthlink, how are they to know that my ssh connection resulted in spam being sent out from China? So the colonblow5000.com website, hosted in China,
I (and I presume those I was responding to) was assuming colonblow5000.com was hosted by Earthlink or a similar "first-world" ISP. The question was whether taking down the site denies someone the "right" to buy Colon Blow.
But you're right and have a point, such "offshore" severs won't take down a site because of spam. This is where ISP's use of (here come the flames) blocking lists come in...
Spammers are stupid,...
First-time spammers (see the comments on the guy's friend whose boss wants to spam), are really, really, really stupid.
2. VIOLATIONS OF EARTHLINK'S ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY...
g.Unsolicited commercial email/Unsolicited bulk email. Using the Services to transmit any unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email. Activities that have the effect of facilitating unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email whether or not that email is commercial in nature, are prohibited.
No doubt "facilitating" covers hosting a website advertised with spam.
I didn't agree to getting over 100 spams a day with no practical upper limit other than what my ISP will/can hold for me between the times I get my email. If it weren't for filters to sort out the mailing lists I DO subscribe to, I'd be tempted to give up on the idea of email.
I've explained at great length that this is immoral, probably illegal, and a really stupid idea all around. He agrees, but his boss really wants that check from the client and I don't know the boss well enough to confront him directly.
Any suggestions on what I can do to put an early end to my friend's career as a spammer? I love the guy like a brother and don't want to see him rendered unemployable and hated by his family and friends, but I also don't want him to lose his job.
Do you know what ISP the company uses? Here's one idea: Call them up, say "I'm an anonymous friend of a friend of a friend... who works at such-and-such company, a customer of yours, which is thinking of advertising their business with spam. Would you call this company and perhaps discuss the possible actions that could result from them spamming? Thanks." I can see where this might have questionable consequences, the boss might say "okay, how the hell did our ISP hear that we were thinking of spamming?" but this should get the message across.
This has already been happening for years, google for joe job. I've not heard of "I'll spam for your competitor to their detriment" advertised as a spamming service, but many spammers have sent spams for other entities, and/or forging antispammers' email addresses in the From: field of spams, as revenge for being turned in/losing hotmail accounts or Geocities sites and such.
It's not really a spam "for" or "against" John Kerry (I must be losing my touch, it took me a few hours to determine this), but it was the spammer phishing for "donations" to the Kerry campaign: the donate link goes to a page that looks like it belongs to johnkerry.com, but accepts donations and sends them to the spammer.
So it's really no different from the Ebay and Citibank phishing spams. THIS is what "unsolicited email" has come to.
The company I work for was blacklisted for having an open relay mail server (which we don't) because one of our customers was pissed off at our pricing or something.
It appears your company knows it was that customer. Can you prove it in court? It may not be good business to sue a customer, but I would imagine this is now a FORMER customer...
What blacklist was this and who uses it? Any decent list should actually TEST for an open relay (it's easy and cheap enough to do as an automated function) before adding an alleged/reported problem. It's regrettable that the antispam community (there is no antispam community...) isn't always as rigorously honest and proper as "we" (tinw...) should be.
Took a lot of work to get our server off the list, even though it was not an open relay.
It appears your company has a case for damages against the blacklist (though these often try to stay as anonymous as spammers) as well as the customer.
Yes, Nazi Germany is worse than spam. What's your point?
I could name specific examples, but that isn't my point: my point is, calling for the deaths of people who do nothing more than create a nuisance for everyone is quite childish. Whether joking or not. It's just stupid.
Calling for spammers' deaths is definitely over the top, but email has become an important communication medium for millions, and spam is threatening to destroy it. There have been occurrences of people losing email because the ISP's mail servers crashed due to being overwhelmed with spam.
As for the original story, I recall that many US hosts started shutting down spamvertised websites around 1998-1999, and I wonder why other "first-world" hosts are only now doing this.
Yes, there's the danger of sites being taken down as the result of "joe jobs" (spamvertising a site the spammer hates, to get it brought down, joes.com was an early victim of such an attack), but the admins and joe-jobbed sites can work that out, either beween each other or in the courts.
The number given 20040156192, and I KNOW the number of patents granted is increasing greatly, BUT... My name is on US Patent 5,982,862 issued 1999, and I'd be VERY surprised if 20,034,173,330 (over twenty BILLION (US billion, 10^9) patents have been issued since then.
I think I see, it's parsed as the year 2004, then the number issued in that year, 0156192. Thus the USPTO has issued a little more than 156,000 patents so far this year. Using this numbering, there can only be 10 million patents issued per year.
But I digress. Back to commenting on the original story:
With patents like this being issued, this patent numbering system can't last much longer than a decade, if that.
... is NOT from solar radiation, it comes from within the Earth. I forget the exact source, and there may be several (nuclear fission of raw radioactive materials, tidal forces of the Moon and Sun (and again to be pedantic, tidal forces have only to do with the masses and distanced involved, not that the Sun is sending fusion-powered radiation to the Earth).
Otherwise, point well taken for many reasons, furthermore, there may be a much stonger emphasis on "clean" (non-burning/non-CO2-producing) energy in the future: http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_33/b38 96001_mz001.htm Even if global warming is eventualy proven not to exist, or it ends up that man-mande emissions don't contrubute to it, I think a form of Pascal's Wager applies: It's better to do something about it and find out we didn't need to, than to not do anything then find out we should have done something.
But this is still a short-term solution: the Sun's energy is constant, our ability to convert and use it on Earth is limited, and the energy consumption of Humanity is growing exponentially.
To provide more energy than the Sun give the Earth, there's the idea of the Solar Power Satellite, that I recall was widely discussed 25 years ago (one fear was that the Soviet Union would shoot it down!).
as in the Superman movie of 25 (?) years ago, every cigarette pack or banner just happened to say Marlboro. It's happening much more nowadays due to Tivo, by which people skip over commercials, in shows such as American Idol where the contestants are shown in (show sponsor) Ford vehicles.
So it will be impossible to tell where the "entertainment product" ends and the advertisement begins. But there's always been a little of that all along.
What happens if your hamstring cramps with 10 M. of altitude?
Presuming there's some seriousness to the question, I at first thought "autorotation" would be the answer but it's my understanding (from Q 10 in the FAQ) that the pilot/pedaler has NO CONTROL other than the amount of power put into the pedals (which seems odd - are they sure it won't tip over or drift?). I don't see how high it is expected to go, but 10 meters seems awfully high. Q 4 says others have flown, as high as 8 inches (20cm): http://batman.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/faq.html#4
The pilot is not a professional cyclist. He is a professional engineer
As a fellow engineer I would like to point out this design flaw.
Seriously though, having a professional cyclist would make a world of difference. Even their Ironman triathlete Engineer (who specalizes in endurace, not 1 minute intervals) is no match for the power output of a pro bike rider.
We have built our own test rig that measures power output of a pilot over a minute duration. We have plotted the results of numerous potential pilots against their weight. A successful candidate is one that falls above a power requirement curve (power vs. weight).
... if the government wants to look through it, they better have a legit reason, such as if they have probable cause a crime has been committed.
If you believe any of the conspiracy-theory hype, Echelon has already been saving this stuff for years. And by your reasoning, it's perfectly justifiable:
"We have probable cause that a crime has been committed [pic of a jaywalker, or maybe of the Kennedy assasination in Dallas], therefore we must save all email."
Where have we seen crap like this before... ? I know! In drug education.
This is a really scary analogy. What might happen to those caught file-swapping? Those sentenced for drug use or posession (even smalltime dealers who show no evidence of actual drug use) often receive the "choice" (thus a very weak claim that it's not being coerced) of 12-step-based "rehab/recovery" or group attendance at AA or NA in exchange for reduced sentencing (such as less jailtime). Not only are 12-step programs A Bad Thing, they are religious (despite the "spitirual not religious" claim) and it is illegal for a Government agency in the US to force attendance. Such attendance is often required by judges, parole officers and other authorities who don't reveal their own 12-step membership - an obvious conflict of interest, but supposedly covered under 12-step "anonymity". I'm not sure if Great Brittain has similar laws, but regrettably, 12-steppism has been exported around the world and members believe that "saving others' lives" by getting them into step groups is more important than silly laws or ethics that might get in the way.
Here is how the Twelve Steps of Downloaders Anonymous might read:
1. We admitted we were powerless over [downloading || P2P networks || stealing over the Internet] and our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Rather than bore you, you can google to brimg up many links to the steps, and just change alcoholics in step 12 to downloaders/mp3 addicts or whatever these people will label themselves with.
Whatever happened to the Smith Bill...
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 1
...first proposed to apply the Junk Fax law to spam (ISTR the Washington State law is similar, and a few people have actually gotten money from spammers through it), seven years ago (!). People won't have to learn to read headers, services will pop up to do all the technical and legal work for a percentage of the fees.
Unfortunately, it's well known that spammers don't actually have any money after buying fried chicken, beer, and paying their trailer rent.
I learned to type even earlier, on ADDS terminals, Decwriters, and the infamous ASR-33. I recall a touchh-typist about hitting the ceiling because some of the keys on the ASR-33 were different from a "standard typewriter" and asking "why didn't anyone tell me???"
But yes, I'm also a "self-taught" typist and don't put my fingers in the right places, but I can still type at a decent speed in spite of not doing it "right."
...is that through resources such as Ebay, half.com, your local public library, garage sales and thrift stores, you can still get manuals for such things -- AND CHEAP! I found a PDP-11 technical programming textbook at my local Goodwill for a buck.
The Net is awesome for finding any used or out-of-print books or manuals of any kind - it used to take months to find something unusual, now it can be in your hands in a couple of days. Here are two valuable resources:
You can do your own shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, finding the occasional RCA Receiving Tube Manual and such (I've done that a lot and now have about 10k books, including 20 tube manuals) but this is hit-or-miss for something specific. For a few more bucks per book, you can often find exactly what you want at one of the metasearch sites above or (if it has an ISBN number) used on amazon.com.
If you still don't find it, you can subscribe to this list: http://www.bibliophilegroup.com/ ($30 per year subscription, two week free trial) and send a WTB: (Want To Buy) post, where hundreds of used book dealers have large portions of their inventories they've yet to enter online, but may have it for you.
Computer manuals before 1970 or so are actually in demand and worth something (maybe $10-$25).
You're asuming that the only alternative to keeping old hardware in service is to put it in landfills. Admittedly, too much decommisioned harware will be landfilled, but it doesn't have to be that way. Old hardware should firstly be offered to computer museums and collectors (perhaps have them sign something saying THEY won't landfill 'em), and if no takers, dismantled and recycled. There's lots of good steel in these old things - 19-inch racks can be reused as-is. The electronics (made of lead-bearing solder-laden printed circuit boards) should definitely be disposed of following HAZMAT regulations rather than just tossing it in the trash.
Slashdot Mirror
The "justification" for this article on physics being in The Economist is apparently spelled out in the first paragraph of TFA:
In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum...
So I suppose there could be an article in Physics Review about an Economics discovery made by a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, but I won't hold my breath.
It would be untraceable back to me. Even if my ISP is Earthlink, how are they to know that my ssh connection resulted in spam being sent out from China? So the colonblow5000.com website, hosted in China,
I (and I presume those I was responding to) was assuming colonblow5000.com was hosted by Earthlink or a similar "first-world" ISP. The question was whether taking down the site denies someone the "right" to buy Colon Blow.
But you're right and have a point, such "offshore" severs won't take down a site because of spam. This is where ISP's use of (here come the flames) blocking lists come in...
Spammers are stupid,...
First-time spammers (see the comments on the guy's friend whose boss wants to spam), are really, really, really stupid.
... some idiot's desire to purchase "Colon Blow 5000" is irrelevant to the issue (which is that ColonBlow5000.com is in breach of contract)
...
Which contract is that?
The one like THIS ONE, which says in part:
2. VIOLATIONS OF EARTHLINK'S ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY
g.Unsolicited commercial email/Unsolicited bulk email. Using the Services to transmit any unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email. Activities that have the effect of facilitating unsolicited commercial email or unsolicited bulk email whether or not that email is commercial in nature, are prohibited.
No doubt "facilitating" covers hosting a website advertised with spam.
I didn't agree to getting over 100 spams a day with no practical upper limit other than what my ISP will/can hold for me between the times I get my email. If it weren't for filters to sort out the mailing lists I DO subscribe to, I'd be tempted to give up on the idea of email.
Phuque spam.
Phuque spammers.
I've explained at great length that this is immoral, probably illegal, and a really stupid idea all around. He agrees, but his boss really wants that check from the client and I don't know the boss well enough to confront him directly.
... who works at such-and-such company, a customer of yours, which is thinking of advertising their business with spam. Would you call this company and perhaps discuss the possible actions that could result from them spamming? Thanks." I can see where this might have questionable consequences, the boss might say "okay, how the hell did our ISP hear that we were thinking of spamming?" but this should get the message across.
Any suggestions on what I can do to put an early end to my friend's career as a spammer? I love the guy like a brother and don't want to see him rendered unemployable and hated by his family and friends, but I also don't want him to lose his job.
Do you know what ISP the company uses? Here's one idea: Call them up, say "I'm an anonymous friend of a friend of a friend
A really good place to ask this and get many other good (probably better) ideas is the SPAM-L mailing list:
http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/
This has already been happening for years, google for joe job. I've not heard of "I'll spam for your competitor to their detriment" advertised as a spamming service, but many spammers have sent spams for other entities, and/or forging antispammers' email addresses in the From: field of spams, as revenge for being turned in/losing hotmail accounts or Geocities sites and such.
Consider this spam for Presidential candidate John Kerry, where the text and links were taken straight from johnkerry.com:
http://it.slashdot.org/~antispam_ben/journal/
It's not really a spam "for" or "against" John Kerry (I must be losing my touch, it took me a few hours to determine this), but it was the spammer phishing for "donations" to the Kerry campaign: the donate link goes to a page that looks like it belongs to johnkerry.com, but accepts donations and sends them to the spammer.
So it's really no different from the Ebay and Citibank phishing spams. THIS is what "unsolicited email" has come to.
The company I work for was blacklisted for having an open relay mail server (which we don't) because one of our customers was pissed off at our pricing or something.
It appears your company knows it was that customer. Can you prove it in court? It may not be good business to sue a customer, but I would imagine this is now a FORMER customer...
What blacklist was this and who uses it? Any decent list should actually TEST for an open relay (it's easy and cheap enough to do as an automated function) before adding an alleged/reported problem. It's regrettable that the antispam community (there is no antispam community...) isn't always as rigorously honest and proper as "we" (tinw...) should be.
Took a lot of work to get our server off the list, even though it was not an open relay.
It appears your company has a case for damages against the blacklist (though these often try to stay as anonymous as spammers) as well as the customer.
Aren't there worse things in the world than spam?
Yes, Nazi Germany is worse than spam. What's your point?
I could name specific examples, but that isn't my point: my point is, calling for the deaths of people who do nothing more than create a nuisance for everyone is quite childish. Whether joking or not. It's just stupid.
Calling for spammers' deaths is definitely over the top, but email has become an important communication medium for millions, and spam is threatening to destroy it. There have been occurrences of people losing email because the ISP's mail servers crashed due to being overwhelmed with spam.
As for the original story, I recall that many US hosts started shutting down spamvertised websites around 1998-1999, and I wonder why other "first-world" hosts are only now doing this.
Yes, there's the danger of sites being taken down as the result of "joe jobs" (spamvertising a site the spammer hates, to get it brought down, joes.com was an early victim of such an attack), but the admins and joe-jobbed sites can work that out, either beween each other or in the courts.
I sure feel old now, my first Mac only had 128k RAM! Fortunately, Dr. Dobb's Journal showed me how to replace the chips to go to 512k.
The number given 20040156192, and I KNOW the number of patents granted is increasing greatly, BUT ... My name is on US Patent 5,982,862 issued 1999, and I'd be VERY surprised if 20,034,173,330 (over twenty BILLION (US billion, 10^9) patents have been issued since then.
I think I see, it's parsed as the year 2004, then the number issued in that year, 0156192. Thus the USPTO has issued a little more than 156,000 patents so far this year. Using this numbering, there can only be 10 million patents issued per year.
But I digress. Back to commenting on the original story:
With patents like this being issued, this patent numbering system can't last much longer than a decade, if that.
... is NOT from solar radiation, it comes from within the Earth. I forget the exact source, and there may be several (nuclear fission of raw radioactive materials, tidal forces of the Moon and Sun (and again to be pedantic, tidal forces have only to do with the masses and distanced involved, not that the Sun is sending fusion-powered radiation to the Earth).
8 96001_mz001.htm
Otherwise, point well taken for many reasons, furthermore, there may be a much stonger emphasis on "clean" (non-burning/non-CO2-producing) energy in the future: http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_33/b3
Even if global warming is eventualy proven not to exist, or it ends up that man-mande emissions don't contrubute to it, I think a form of Pascal's Wager applies: It's better to do something about it and find out we didn't need to, than to not do anything then find out we should have done something.
But this is still a short-term solution: the Sun's energy is constant, our ability to convert and use it on Earth is limited, and the energy consumption of Humanity is growing exponentially.
To provide more energy than the Sun give the Earth, there's the idea of the Solar Power Satellite, that I recall was widely discussed 25 years ago (one fear was that the Soviet Union would shoot it down!).
as in the Superman movie of 25 (?) years ago, every cigarette pack or banner just happened to say Marlboro. It's happening much more nowadays due to Tivo, by which people skip over commercials, in shows such as American Idol where the contestants are shown in (show sponsor) Ford vehicles.
So it will be impossible to tell where the "entertainment product" ends and the advertisement begins. But there's always been a little of that all along.
What happens if your hamstring cramps with 10 M. of altitude?
4
Presuming there's some seriousness to the question, I at first thought "autorotation" would be the answer but it's my understanding (from Q 10 in the FAQ) that the pilot/pedaler has NO CONTROL other than the amount of power put into the pedals (which seems odd - are they sure it won't tip over or drift?). I don't see how high it is expected to go, but 10 meters seems awfully high. Q 4 says others have flown, as high as 8 inches (20cm):
http://batman.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/faq.html#
The pilot is not a professional cyclist. He is a professional engineer
As a fellow engineer I would like to point out this design flaw.
Seriously though, having a professional cyclist would make a world of difference. Even their Ironman triathlete Engineer (who specalizes in endurace, not 1 minute intervals) is no match for the power output of a pro bike rider.
Did you RTFF? Quoting from TFF at http://batman.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/faq.html:
14.) HOW WAS THE PILOT CHOSEN?
We have built our own test rig that measures power output of a pilot over a minute duration. We have plotted the results of numerous potential pilots against their weight. A successful candidate is one that falls above a power requirement curve (power vs. weight).
My favorite quote? [from Microsoft] "There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness"."
Anything over 7-10 years would definately be too long to save e-mail.
That's why I save my email to CD-R's, to guarantee it won't be readable in 7-10 years. (!)
... in my very own personal Privacy Policy page.
... if the government wants to look through it, they better have a legit reason, such as if they have probable cause a crime has been committed.
If you believe any of the conspiracy-theory hype, Echelon has already been saving this stuff for years. And by your reasoning, it's perfectly justifiable:
"We have probable cause that a crime has been committed [pic of a jaywalker, or maybe of the Kennedy assasination in Dallas], therefore we must save all email."
Where have we seen crap like this before ... ? I know! In drug education.
This is a really scary analogy. What might happen to those caught file-swapping? Those sentenced for drug use or posession (even smalltime dealers who show no evidence of actual drug use) often receive the "choice" (thus a very weak claim that it's not being coerced) of 12-step-based "rehab/recovery" or group attendance at AA or NA in exchange for reduced sentencing (such as less jailtime). Not only are 12-step programs A Bad Thing, they are religious (despite the "spitirual not religious" claim) and it is illegal for a Government agency in the US to force attendance. Such attendance is often required by judges, parole officers and other authorities who don't reveal their own 12-step membership - an obvious conflict of interest, but supposedly covered under 12-step "anonymity". I'm not sure if Great Brittain has similar laws, but regrettably, 12-steppism has been exported around the world and members believe that "saving others' lives" by getting them into step groups is more important than silly laws or ethics that might get in the way.
Here is how the Twelve Steps of Downloaders Anonymous might read:
1. We admitted we were powerless over [downloading || P2P networks || stealing over the Internet] and our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Rather than bore you, you can google to brimg up many links to the steps, and just change alcoholics in step 12 to downloaders/mp3 addicts or whatever these people will label themselves with.
...first proposed to apply the Junk Fax law to spam (ISTR the Washington State law is similar, and a few people have actually gotten money from spammers through it), seven years ago (!). People won't have to learn to read headers, services will pop up to do all the technical and legal work for a percentage of the fees.
Unfortunately, it's well known that spammers don't actually have any money after buying fried chicken, beer, and paying their trailer rent.
Rather than take the series in an interesting and new direction, we're essentially getting the same series but with better F/X.
But wouldn't that ruin it? I'm not a True Fan, but I thought "camp" was an integral part of the show.
I learned to type even earlier, on ADDS terminals, Decwriters, and the infamous ASR-33. I recall a touchh-typist about hitting the ceiling because some of the keys on the ASR-33 were different from a "standard typewriter" and asking "why didn't anyone tell me???"
But yes, I'm also a "self-taught" typist and don't put my fingers in the right places, but I can still type at a decent speed in spite of not doing it "right."
Chances are you can find your emulator for most any 8-bit computer through http://www.google.com/.
...is that through resources such as Ebay, half.com, your local public library, garage sales and thrift stores, you can still get manuals for such things -- AND CHEAP! I found a PDP-11 technical programming textbook at my local Goodwill for a buck.
The Net is awesome for finding any used or out-of-print books or manuals of any kind - it used to take months to find something unusual, now it can be in your hands in a couple of days. Here are two valuable resources:
http://www.bookfinder.com/
http://used.addall.com/
You can do your own shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, finding the occasional RCA Receiving Tube Manual and such (I've done that a lot and now have about 10k books, including 20 tube manuals) but this is hit-or-miss for something specific. For a few more bucks per book, you can often find exactly what you want at one of the metasearch sites above or (if it has an ISBN number) used on amazon.com.
If you still don't find it, you can subscribe to this list:
http://www.bibliophilegroup.com/ ($30 per year subscription, two week free trial)
and send a WTB: (Want To Buy) post, where hundreds of used book dealers have large portions of their inventories they've yet to enter online, but may have it for you.
Computer manuals before 1970 or so are actually in demand and worth something (maybe $10-$25).
why landfill working hardware?
You're asuming that the only alternative to keeping old hardware in service is to put it in landfills. Admittedly, too much decommisioned harware will be landfilled, but it doesn't have to be that way. Old hardware should firstly be offered to computer museums and collectors (perhaps have them sign something saying THEY won't landfill 'em), and if no takers, dismantled and recycled. There's lots of good steel in these old things - 19-inch racks can be reused as-is. The electronics (made of lead-bearing solder-laden printed circuit boards) should definitely be disposed of following HAZMAT regulations rather than just tossing it in the trash.